Last week’s post looked at the history of Oatlands Palace up to its complete demolition in 1653. Today’s is going to look at the mansions that replaced it, and their amazing gardens especially those created by the Earl of Lincoln and his son the Duke of Newcastle in the 18th century. Their grandeur and then decline make a good story, especially when coupled with the antics of the Duke and Duchess of York [no not the modern ones but their Georgian forebears]

I thought it might have been some difficulty to fill a second post about Oatlands but how wrong could I  be as you will find out if you read on…

After a succession of noblemen had leased the estate for the crown on a short-term basis,  Oatlands  finally passed into the hands of Henry Clinton, 7th earl of Lincoln, who in the 1720s decided to build a new Palladian mansion – Oatlands House – overlooking the Thames and 500 metres east of the original palace site. Lord Lincoln may have had advice on the design of his new home  from Lord Burlington because designs by the latter exist in the Burlington Devonshire archives at RIBA, although there is no sign that his villa was ever  built.

Unfortunately no sooner had Lincoln  finished the house  in 1728 than he died.  His elder son became 8th earl but he also died very soon afterwards so the estate passed to his second son Henry, the 9th Earl who was later to become the Duke of Newcastle-under-Lyne.  

  Lincoln’s Newcastle title is a bit complicated because his uncle, Thomas Pelham, was Duke of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, but having no children that title would have become extinct so George II also created him Duke of Newcastle-under-Lyne in 1756  with a special remainder for inheritance through his nephew, Lincoln. That’s the sort of thing you could do if your Uncle Thomas was Prime Minister. 

 

Unlike the rest of his family – his uncle and guardian the double Duke of Newcastle,  and his other uncle Henry Pelham who was also prime minister – the 9th earl  was  not interested in politics, preferring a quiet country life. In the mid-decades of the century he transformed the gardens and grounds of his father’s house both by landscaping and importing and planting rare trees.  [There’s a detailed list of these in Michael’s Symes’s article in Garden History in 1981 about the estate]

Luckily his lordship also commissioned a survey of the estate by the Rocque brothers which reveals the full extent of his alterations.   What we don’t know of course is whether the Rocques recorded what had been done or merely what was proposed.

The Earl did not do it alone and amongst those who advised him apart from Lord Burlington, were William Kent, and Joseph Spence. In 1755 at the latest his team was also joined by Stephen Wright, former assistant to Kent and Clerk of Works at Hampton Court  who was to work at Oatlands and nearby Claremont, the home of the Duke of Newcastle, for many years. [See this earlier post for more on Claremont]

[Wright is a very interesting but little-known character. Read more about him and his work here. For more on Lord Lincoln, for whom there is no published biography see this chronology of his life.  He’d make a good subject for a Ph.D so get in touch if you’re interested in the challenge!]

The backbone of the new landscape was the half-mile long terrace with its   views over the Thames Valley.  From there a series of angled slopes were cut down to a long canal with two shorter cross pieces which had been formed from existing ponds. On the opposite side of the canal was an amphitheatre much simpler in design than Bridgeman’s at Claremont. Rocque’s plan also shows a bowling green and elaborately laid out woodlands and wildernesses. Inigo Jones’s classical gateway which had survived the Commonwealth period was dismantled and moved to the east end of the terrace where it overlooked a  patte d’oie or ‘goose foot’ which had an  avenue specifically designed to give a long view across to Claremont.

The palace ruins and courtyards became the site of the kitchen garden, and it was probably there, in the mid-century, that  “Henry Scott, Gardener at Weybridge in Surrey” grew pineapples, with the remains of pine pits being discovered in the foundations of the Palace during  20th century excavations.

But this was a period of transition in garden design and it wasn’t long before Lincoln’s very formal scheme [assuming it was all built in the first place]  fell out of fashion. Stephen Wright, effectively working as estate manager, then  oversaw further major changes from the late 1750s into the mid-1760s, the bills for which  amounting to some £10,000, with a further nearly £900 for tree planting,  are in the Newcastle papers at Nottingham University.

These included the Temple of Venus which was constructed rather flimsily  in 1757-58 of wood on brick foundations although it had a dome, pediments and finials as decoration. A couple of years later it was dismantled and moved to a new riverside site as seen in the engraving above.  It echoes the one that Wright’s former boss, William Kent built rather more solidly at Stowe but it did not last long and is not mentioned in visitor accounts.

There was also a Temple of Vesta, built around 1771 to resemble the one at Tivoli, again following in the footsteps of Kent’s Temple of Ancient virtue at Stowe, although Wright’s had both a cellar and an upper room.     Recent research also suggests that Wright also designed the  entrance gates, perhaps using another of Kent’s idea. These were later moved and now form the entrance to Oatlnds Park Hotel.

For more on the gates and their history see “The Mystery of Oatlands Park Gates”   Part 1 and  Part 2 on the Elmbridge Museum website.

Of course the biggest undertaking was  the “naturalising” of the canal into the 3/4 mile serpentine Broadwater Lake which must have been a massive enterprise both physically and in engineering terms.  Much later John Claudius  Loudon who did not normally approve of what he called “imitations of rivers” calling them “unnatural and absurd”  made an exception for the one at Oatlands  which he said  was “not unfrequently mistaken for the Thames itself.”

Stephen Wright also designed the grotto which must rank as one of the most  extraordinary garden buildings ever built in Britain.  In fact it’s so extraordinary that  rather than trying to squash it in with everything else it is going to get a post of its own in a few weeks time.

In 1764 Lincoln acquired the Clumber estate in Nottinghamshire. Gradually over the next twenty or so years his affection for it grew so later when massive debts built up he  sold Oatlands and moved his base to Clumber.  Oatlands with 568 acres now  passed back into royal hands  in 1788 when it was bought by Frederick Augustus, the Grand Old Duke of York, second son of George III and Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, for £30,000.  He and his new wife,  the Prussian Princess Frederica, moved there the following year but theirs was not a successful marriage and they soon spent most of their time apart in an amicable separation.

The Duchess was somewhat eccentric, continued  living at Oatalnds surrounded by a menagerie of animals. Apart from the usual cats and dogs there were lots of parrots, a Brahmin bull, wallabies, rare goats, eagles ostriches and peacocks as well as large numbers of monkeys. There was also a flock of merino sheep, a breed which had  only just reached England in 1787, after  Sir Joseph Banks acquired a small batch of pure Spanish Merinos via Portugal and gave them to the royal family.

The Duchess wa so attached to her animals that she visited her farmyard everyday. Thomas Raikes in his journal records a lovely anecdotes about her noticing  “a sow that had lately farrowed some beautiful pigs. A few days afterwards at dinner some person asked her if she would eat some roasted pig. Her answer was: “ No, I thank you, I never eat my acquaintance.”

In his 1876 Handbook to the Environs of London, author James Thorne wrote on the same theme “She protected the wild song birds, and would not allow a rook to be shot; the cows and pigs on the farm would run to her sure of a choice morsel; whilst for dogs her partiality was excessive, and to her visitors annoying; but doubtless she found, as she says in one of her shapeless rhymes, their ‘frolic play Enlivened oft the lonesome hours.’ ”

“She did not neglect them even when dead. Around the margin of a circular basin for gold fish (now drained), she formed a cemetery for her pets, burying each in turn with care, strewing its grave with flowers, and placing over it a little stone “with the animal’s name, date of decease, and, if its merit was remarkable, a tribute in verse from her own pen. Sixty or seventy of these stones still fringe the margin of the hollow; and when the Queen visited Oatlands in 1871, noticing that the tombstones were out of order, she, with her usual kindliness, gave orders for their restoration. They now look quite fresh, and four or five have been added for dogs recently deceased.”

If you want to know more about her pet graveyard there was an article about, with more photos in The Sketch in 1898

There are a lot of satirical cartoons about the Duke and his infidelity etc on the British Museum website although some are difficult to understand without the contemporary context. The Duchess fares slightly better she became the dedicatee of an early and very moral board game The Mansion of Happiness. with a representation of Oatlands. The game is very strict compared to other moral games of the same period. The crimes are serious–theft, lying, drunkenness, cheating–and the punishments include prison sentences, whipping, the stocks and ducking: ‘Whoever gets into a Passion must be taken to the Water, have a  ducking to cool him and pay a fine of one.”  She was also the dedicatee of a laudatory [but turgid] poem Oatlands or the transfer of the laurel. by John O’Keeffe in 1795.

One wing of the house burned down in 1794,  and the Duke used it as an opportunity to have it rebuilt in the popular Gothick style of the period to designs by Henry Holland . It was not viewed entirely as a success with an account of a visit to Oatlands in The Monthly Magazine which is highly critical of the Duke’s farming, apart from the Merinos, and says the house is “viewed comparatively without admiration…The Duke has lately stuecoed the front, so as to resemble stone but it looks like brick at a distance… In the front, next the canal, the castellated gothic architecture is attempted, the parapet wall exhibiting square interstices modelled as battlements. The modern bow-window, however,  cannot pass without reprehension…

 

Finding the ducal couple at dinner in a tent near the house the writer “followed some company along the canal which I had heard so much of—but in pronouncing on its merits, I must confess I was greatly disappointed. It is insignificant in point of breadth ; the water is bad ; it has none of that playful rapidity which is an essential characteristic of a running stream, being covered with broad-leaved weeds, and possessing the appearance of a stagnant pool. To me, wealth appears to have been employed with a profusion of diligence, but not with sufficient taste and judgment…”

After the death of The Duchess in 1820  the Duke put the estate up for sale and the catalogue show show that  many changes had been made in the gardens especially those on the site of the old palace since he had bought it.  The market garden continued but expanded with outbuildings against the north wall, and new glasshouses and melon pits with the whole area divided into three by the erection of two east–west walls. It was clearly a successful enterprise with a Mr Toy of Oatlands Palace Gardens regularly winning prizes, particularly for grapes,  at shows in the 1840s and 1850s.

Oatlands itself was bought in 1824 by the Regency dandy and notorious gambler Edward Hughes Ball Hughes, for £145,000, and then drastically remodelled again. Later Ball fled abroad to escape his creditors,  but  auctioned off some of the land and leased the house and 537 acres to  Lord  Egerton.  However, according to John Claudius Loudon who visited in 1837 Egerton had shown little interest in maintaining the grounds which “persons of taste, who may have visited this place in days long gone by, must view ..with regret.”

In 1846 Ball auctioned off the rest of the estate, divided into 64 lots.  336 acres were allocated for building plots largely for luxury villas and reached over £100 an acre mainly because of their proximity to the new London and Southampton Railway which had opened in 1838.

Held in two parts the sale netted Ball nearly £70,000 with another £6000 from the sale of the timber.  Lot 1, the house and 97 acres (c 40ha), was acquired privately for another  £11,000 by James Watts Peppercorne.

The fate of the Inigo Jones gateway can probably be guessed.  It was still  on the terrace according to the 1846 sales plan but at some point after that it was sold, broken up and some of the remains bought for the construction of  a rockery where they remained until the 1960s when they were  retrieved and given to the local Museum.

Mr Peppercorne was a stockbroker who, like is father, turns out to have a somewhat shady side. The father was the “guilty” party in a cornerstone of the law relating to fiduciary duty and the son in 1846 sold Oatlands  to the South Western Hotel Company (of which he was director) and appointed himself as the first manager!  Notable early guests included Edward Lear, Anthony Trollope and Emile Zola who sought seclusion there  after the Dreyfus case.

The hotel was requisitioned during the First World War for injured New Zealander soldiers, specifically ‘medical & tuberculosis cases and limbless men’.

It re-opened in 1919 and has continued to flourish ever since.

For more information the best place to start is the website of Elmbridge Museum and there’s also an erudite but very readable article New Light on Oatlands Park by Michael Symes in Garden History 1981. This is full of detail about the costs of all the various works derived from the Newcastle archives at Nottingham university.  The hotel website also includes a potted history as well as contemporary images. References to the grotto will appear in a future post.